has no power, O no, not a modicum! to help the slaveholders of the District, however loudly they may clamor for it.  The southern doctrine, that Congress is to the District a mere local Legislature to do its pleasure, is tumbled from the genitive into the vocative!  Hard fate—­and that too at the hands of those who begat it!  The reasonings of Messrs. Pinckney and Wise, are now found to be wholly at fault, and the chanticleer rhetoric of Messrs. Glascock and Garland stalks featherless and crest-fallen.  For the resolution sweeps by the board all those stereotyped common-places, such as “Congress a local Legislature,” “consent of the District,” “bound to consult the wishes of the District,” with other catch phrases, which for the last two sessions of Congress have served to eke out scanty supplies.  It declares, that as slavery existed in Maryland and Virginia at the time of the cession, and as it still continues in both those states, it could not be abolished in the District without a violation of “that good faith,” &c.

But let us see where this principle will lead us.  If “implied faith” to Maryland and Virginia restrains Congress from the abolition of slavery in the District, because those states have not abolished their slavery, it requires Congress to do in the District what those states have done within their own limits, i.e., restrain others from abolishing it.  Upon the same principle Congress is bound to prohibit emancipation within the District.  There is no stopping place for this plighted “faith.”  Congress must not only refrain from laying violent hands on slavery, and see to it that the slaveholders themselves do not, but it is bound to keep the system up to the Maryland and Virginia standard of vigor!

Again, if the good faith of Congress to Virginia and Maryland requires that slavery should exist in the District, while it exists in those states, it requires that it should exist there as it exists in those states.  If to abolish every form of slavery in the District would violate good faith, to abolish the form existing in those states, and to substitute a different one, would also violate it.  The Congressional “good faith” is to be kept not only with slavery, but with the Maryland and Virginia systems of slavery.  The faith of those states being not that Congress would maintain a system, but their system; otherwise instead of sustaining, Congress would counteract their policy—­principles would be brought into action there conflicting with their system, and thus the true sprit of the “implied” pledge would be violated.  On this principle, so long as slaves are “chattels personal” in Virginia and Maryland, Congress could not make them real estate in the District, as they are in Louisiana; nor could it permit slaves to read, nor to worship God according to conscience; nor could it grant them trial by jury, nor legalize marriage; nor